A blog of our adventures around the world as location-independent digital nomads.

October 2, 2015

IROS 2015 in Hamburg

This post is written by Katie, about her experience at IROS 2015.

I traveled to Hamburg to attend IROS 2015. I was able to see some of Hamburg during the conference, but I was mainly focused on networking, getting enough rest, and practicing my slides for both talks I had to give (one Wednesday and one Friday).

The CCH conference center

The walk between the CCH conference site and my hostel was pretty!

My Wednesday talk was actually really important because this paper was a finalist (one of three) for the RoboCup best paper award. Hence, I wanted this talk to be perfect (thanks to Carrie for recording!). I think the talk went about as well as it could have gone, but our paper did not end up winning. It was disappointing, but it is still a great honor for our paper to have been nominated.

IROS had social events almost every night of the conference with plenty of free/included German beer. I did not know many people at the conference, so I spent a lot of time with the two people I did know: Carrie from Oregon State and Tim from B-Human (also my co-author on the paper nominated for the RoboCup best paper award). Matteo, a post-doc in my research group, as well as Chui, a previous post-doc in my research group, arrived for the last day of workshops. I met many new people at the conference, most notably the group from Southern Germany who I sat with at the Wednesday night ‘Oktoberfest’ banquet. Being from Southern Germany, they had much to say about how this was not a real Oktoberfest party.

Overhead view of the Oktoberfest party near the end of the night

Overall, I saw a lot of interesting research, met a lot of new people, and generally had a good experience at IROS.

Presenting our ‘Late Breaking’ poster

I’m so excited to be returning to Germany next summer for RoboCup 2016!